3. “Before Babel, after Pentecost: The Function of Foreign Languages and Lingua Franca in the Commedia as a Semiotic Motif in Dante’s Poetics of the Threshold,” James Carson Nohrnberg, Univ. of Virginia

4. “Conversing with the Dead: Using Dante Heuristically for a Poetics of Cultural History,” Jonathan C. White, Univ. of Essex